After almost two years of herstorical collective blogging, Radfem Hub is now reopened as an archives.

“The Hub” was a collective radical feminist blog and its purpose was to post fresh, original radfem content, provide a male-free and safe platform for women to discuss, and promote radical feminist perspectives and interests.

These 4 days of feminist film festival in London have brought me back the hope, the sisterly, positive and creative energy that Patriarchy and men were stealing away from me for the last few months of activism. Being in the company of radical feminists from different parts of the world and spending entire days watching feminist films about women bravely fighting against men’s violence, bonding together, pushing the boundaries of their captivity in the male system and creating new worlds of their own, was enough to fill me with renewed joy and fire. The number and quality of films shown was truly impressive, most of which I had not seen before. I was amazed by how refreshingly radical some of the films and debates were, the organisers had done a great job at selecting the films and panellists from many different backgrounds.

Virginia Woolf ‘tried to speak the truth…wrung it drop by drop from my brain,’ and made the commitment to experience the world as female, but what did it cost her?

For a woman to comprehend her condition is to trigger the precursor for madness, therefore she learns early on to bury the implications of it, erase her knowledge of it, stifle it, plaster over it with hobbies and food and shopping and sex, blocking out the information she needs in order to realise her authenticity. Now and again she catches glimpses of it (the truth), and if the planets align then the chasm breaks open, and it is total; and if she’s lucky—only if she’s lucky— she becomes a radical feminist.

This post is the final part of a series of posts based on some of the RadFem Reboot 2012 presentation talk that I gave in Oregon recently on the patriarchal takeover of women’s sexuality. Part I is here, Part II is here.

Definition: As this is the final part here, I would like to make it clear by what I mean by BDSM for the purpose of this series. BDSM is ‘Bondage, Discipline, Sadism and Masochism (formerly known as ‘sadomasochism’); a form of patriarchal sexuality involving the eroticisation of the symbols of slavery, misogyny, captivity, rape and torture. It is a sexuality that involves the most egregious dynamics of domination and subordination (a.k.a. ‘dom/sub’) and the sexualisation of pain and/or danger.’

*****

So what happened to the woman-identified woman nowadays? Let me first go back to the origins and causes of the mainstreaming of BDSM within contemporary lesbian culture and communities. I will then elaborate more on how BDSM prevents revolution.

This post is the second part of a series of posts based on some of the RadFem Reboot 2012 presentation talk that I gave in Oregon recently on the patriarchal takeover of women’s sexuality. Part I is here.

Warning: This post contains some graphic depictions of pornified lesbian culture. I believe it is important to know what some lesbians are watching, making, writing & reading ‘for fun’ these days. The examples taken from lesbian media are not ‘isolated cases.’ Many lesbians I spoke to actually say that they ‘love’ websites like Autostraddle or magazines such as Diva UK. These things are part of mainstream lesbian culture today.

*****

As pointed out at the end of the first part (on lesbian BDSM fanfiction, a cultural phenomenon within lesbian culture), the fandoms of Xena, Buffy, Stargate SG-1, Rizzoli & Isles (or whatever show lesbians want to read BDSM fan fiction from) are not the only lesbian cultures that have been affected by patriarchy. No, unfortunately, there are many more aspects of contemporary lesbian culture that have been poisoned by patriarchal ideology and male-centred sexuality too.

There is nothing wrong with me–except I was born at least two thousand years too late. Ladies of Amazonian proportions and Berserker propensities have passed quite out of vogue and have no place in this too damned civilized world…here I sit—mad as a hatter—with nothing to do but either become madder and madder or else recover enough of my sanity to be allowed to go back to the life which drove me mad. [Lara Jefferson]

Early Wednesday morning, my six year old daughter was running about the house, tearful and enraged, shouting through her sobs,”No Mummy, No! I’m NOT going to school”. She refused to get dressed, hid in the closet and then eventually resorted to feigning a stomach ache. When I’d got her to calm down I managed to find out what was wrong:

This post is the first part of a series of posts based on some of the RadFem Reboot 2012 presentation talk that I gave in Oregon recently on the patriarchal takeover of women’s sexuality.

Warning: This post contains some descriptions of what happens in written pornography. Skip those parts if you feel queasy; read them if you really want to know what some lesbians are writing & reading ‘for fun’ these days.

Disclaimers: By writing this post I would like to make very clear that I am not criticising individual women for having particular sorts of fantasy. I am a former BDSMer myself. I am actually being critical of the pornographic works being published online, and of the patriarchal context within which such stories get written and read in the first place. I believe it is important to challenge the everyday political poisoning of our lesbian communities by BDSM culture. If you read or write those kinds of stories, I am not ‘attacking’ you personally; I am just trying to make a point concerning what you read or write.

*****

I feel the need to talk about fan fiction, as it has become an important part of lesbian culture nowadays in some circles. This includes stories based on the characters of Willow & Tara (from Buffy: Vampire Slayer) and Xena & Gabrielle (from Xena: Warrior Princess) –and there are also lesbian fan fiction stories based on the characters of Stargate SG-1, Rizzoli & Isles or other shows lesbians happen to be fans of.

This is the final part of the series on sisterhood in application. After looking at the consequences of trauma induced by male violence on our groups and how masculinist abuse operates in women-only feminist spaces, in this part I will look at group structure and how certain kinds of structures may favour effective political work and healthy relations in feminist activism. By group structure, I mean not only the structure of relations between the women within a group, but also the way actions are constructed: the kind of priorities established, the way in which objectives are pursued, goals articulated, the strategies or means chosen for their implementation.

Gender Identity Watch is a new blog devoted to tracking legislation and case law that attempts to codify “gender identity” into law and to override protections based on sex. Gender Identity Watch monitors organizations that push gender identity and thus engage in the erasure of female reality, including:

Radical feminism, by definition, seeks to dis-cover and examine the root of women’s global oppression by men, and the sources of male power. In our work, we have discovered that there are several key themes that appear over and over, and which transcend time and place — this is evidence that women’s oppression by men is class-based, that is, that women as a sexual class, around the world, share the experience of being oppressed by men because we are women.

In this series, republished in part from Radfem-ological Images, we present 17 themes for discussion and analysis. Like all radical feminists previously and presently, we do this because it is the truth, and radical feminists accept the truth no matter what it is, especially the truths about women’s lives and what men do to us.

In Part Four, the final part of this series, we present the following themes: Pornify girl children/infantilize adult women; Primacy of the nuclear family; Reversal; Support patriarchal institutions (medicine/religion/law); Woman as “useful object”. Part One is here. Part Two is here. Part Three is here.